President’s Message

dana-remingtonWe have concluded our second annual Sierra Chapter Engineering Excellence Awards dinner meeting with four excellent projects. Drake Haglan and Associates won two awards, Best Bridge project and Best Community Design Project.  The Hanna Group won for Best Transportation Project and finally KSN won the Best Flood Control Project award.  All parties were well represented and took home smiles and plaques for all of their hard work.

Keynote speaker Celia McAdam, Executive Director of the Placer County Transportation Planning Agency, updated members on the upcoming ballot measure sponsored by the Transportation Agency. This ballot measure will add a ½ cent to the existing sales tax rate within Placer County to fund maintenance of existing roads. This includes the creation of new bike trails, pedestrian paths, bike lanes, increased public transportation and update existing congested highways throughout Placer County.

At the end of September, California ACEC held the annual Conference and Quarterly Board of Directors meeting in Kauai, HI at The Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort & Spa in Poipu. I still can’t believe I went all the way to Hawaii and didn’t play any golf. The resort had some spectacular views that left me wishing I could have stayed longer. There was much discussion regarding Duty to Defend and QBS during the board meeting as well as standard state business conversation. We actually did complete some work , most likely due to the fact that there were no windows in the conference room. And who dare say we are not a lively crowd? We did have a small bird who attended a portion of the board meeting before he/she had had enough fun for one afternoon.

All  Sierra Chapter state board members were in attendance at the board meeting and conference. There were a variety of excellent local speakers thanks to the Hawaii ACEC Chapter, and also Bernard Carvalho, Mayor of Kauai.  To our delight, he started the Tuesday morning General Session with a song that he sang in the native Hawaiian language!  We also heard from David Ige, Governor of Hawaii, Ford Fuchigami, Director of Transportation, Hawaii, and Brennon Morioka, Deputy Executive Director with the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

Next on the agenda is the Presidential election on November 8th. As I said in my previous newsletter, the most important thing we can do for each and every election is to simply vote. I will admit that I may not vote  every single position or proposition.  However, if we don’t vote we don’t have justification to complain about the outcome. More importantly, there are a number of local issues that may or may not impact your day to day life but their outcome will affect our local region.

Now it’s back to reality and work for all of us attendees. Our upcoming membership lunch meeting on October 19th will feature Ray Leftwich P.E. City Engineer for the City of Lincoln.  Details on the attached meeting invitation.

I’ll get off my little soapbox and bid everybody a wonderful afternoon or evening, depending on when you read this newsletter.

Aloha.

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Author: Editorial Team